Teaching Kids General Knowledge

Is General Knowledge something that can be taught? or is it something that grows with age and experience?

I believe that both are true. The more information and experiences we can expose our kids to, the greater their general knowledge is likely to become. The way we can 'teach' general knowledge is by providing the experiences and contexts for our kids to learn about the world; and also sharing our own general knowledge with our kids.

What got me thinking about all of this was something we've been doing with our girls from the book -

 "The New First Aid in English".

It has a whole list of 259 general knowledge questions in it that we've been going through after dinner in the evenings. the girls are enjoying the challenge of seeing what they know and learning more trivia. They both have little trivia books that they love reading and telling us lots of 'useful' facts from!

There have been some questions that we've been surprised the girls don't know the answers too - but equally the odd one we've been unsure of! I have to admit I didn't know what an 'ackee' was! (it's a kind of tree with a red pear shaped fruit!).

There are plenty of games to play that help to increase general knowledge. From board games like Trivial Pursuits and card games like Top Trumps; to car journey games like taking turns to name countries of cities beginning with every letter of the alphabet.

Reading magazines, books and newspapers, listening to music, the radio and watching TV; playing outside, playing computer games - pretty much everything we do increases our general knowledge in some way as we learn about the world around us.

Quizzes are a fun way to see what you know - just as we have trivia nights as adults - kids enjoy this kind of thing too. We'll definitely be doing more quizzes with our girls!

Do you have any quiz sources or games to recommend?